José Saramago, "Reflux" (trans. Giovanni Pontiero) (Portugal)

It’s December 23. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on José Saramago’s story, “Reflux”:

“Et in Arcadia ego”—“I too am in Arcadia”—is the title of a seventeenth-century painting by Poussin, intimating that even in the bucolic landscape of Arcadia, Death must be present. Inspired by Poussin’s painting, the Portuguese Nobel prize winner José Saramago imagined a certain king who, because of his great fear of death that makes him avoid all sight of funeral processions, graves or mourning attire, orders a huge cemetery to be built with a high wall all around it, in order to shield his eyes from any reminder that all things must pass. Because of the extensive engineering work required for such an enterprise, a series of businesses spring up around the cemetery plot and slowly begin to form a large city. However, a cypress tree becomes visible over the wall, a simple reminder that “in Arcadia ego.”

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